News and Insight for Sales Leaders by Gerhard Gschwandtner

Sales Training

04/05/2016

Today’s post is by John C. Kolencik, who has been conducting business simulations for client companies for more than 20 years. His company, Matrix Impact (http://www.matriximpact.com), focuses on increasing clients’ sales revenue an average of 42 percent by finding the best people, training them, and providing high-producing lead generation.

Organizations are only as strong as the people who work for it. That makes people your most precious resource. It also makes the hiring, assessment, and development of A-Players critical best practices in any company. Nobody wants to make a mistake in hiring or promoting. So why is it one of the most under-taught, under-improved processes in all of business?

One of the best ways to improve your hiring, assessment, and development of A-Players is the use of simulations, but fewer than 2 percent of all businesses use them – and it is a mystery to me. What this stat screams is that, when simulations are utilized correctly, you can differentiate your business from at least 98 percent of your competition.

I mean, nobody would buy a car without taking it for a test drive, nor would an airline hire pilots unless they could prove – in a flight simulator – that they were competent. So why choose to hire or promote someone without seeing their true ability to perform required business tasks with your own eyes?

Here are the six reasons simulations should be an integral part of any hiring, promotion, and training processes.

#1: The 5:1 Ratio

A mis-hire/promote costs the company 5 times the candidate’s annual compensation (e.g., a $50,000 salary costs the company $250,000).

With training, it’s just as easy to see the ROI. A business parable for you:

CEO said to the CFO: “We have to train our people to get better.”

CFO says: “But what if we invest time and money to train them and they leave us to go to our competitor?”

CEO shoots back: “What if we don’t train them and they stay?”

Whether it is a mis-hire or a less-than-adequately-trained employee, the impact on client relations, revenue, productivity, supervision time, and morale is negative – and it is huge.

#2: The Power of Proof

Have you ever had an interview where the person told you they couldn’t do the job? Or have you ever had a person who “stretched” their abilities in the interview and, as a result, you were cleaning their messes for days, weeks, or months after?

A best practice simulation provides you “point-to-point correspondence” with the job. When the activities found in the simulation are a replica of activities required on the job, you get an accurate portrayal of skill level.

This is also why simulations are critical to training. Do you really want salespeople “practicing” on customers? Of course you don’t! General George Patton once said, “The more my troops sweat in peacetime, the less they bleed during combat.” Simulations are a must in all continual development.

Reason #3: How They Handle the Debrief

Once they perform in the simulation, how do they respond to constructive criticism? Are they thin-skinned? Do they gloat? Is their self-confidence warranted? Many times, you find out the best and the worst of people by observing how they handle coaching.

It also opens a window to know how they learn best. Through the debrief, you will discover what they will and won’t respond to. This can be invaluable as you continue to train and develop your team.

Reason #4: Go to the Video

When recorded, simulations help reduce – if not remove – bias and subjectivity in the hiring process in one big way: “The eye in the sky does not lie.” You don’t want a he-said/she-said situation in any business scenario, but especially in simulations.

Here’s a great example of the benefit of recording simulations: A hiring manager who got a “good hit” off a candidate in an interview might get a completely different feeling after watching a recorded simulation. The candidate might be the most charming person in the world, but, when the time came, he didn’t have the skills he had trumpeted. In any business, that is a disaster averted.

Recorded simulations are irreplaceable in training as well. There is nothing better than being able to go back and review specific areas for either praise or correction. Plus, reviewing with individuals their recorded progress or regression is a very powerful training tool.

Reason #5: Onboarding

Even if somebody is an A-Player, it does not mean he or she is perfect. Too many onboarding programs fail to adapt to the candidate, thus slowing the speed to effectiveness of the new hire.

Simulations don’t just weed out bad candidates. They also help assess a good candidate’s specific strengths and weaknesses in a hyper-accurate way. This allows you to design/implement an onboarding process to speed them to productivity. Not to mention, it helps in offer decisions such as salary negotiations.

Reason #6: Positioning Your Company as the Best

The War for Talent is upon us and there are only so many A-Players out there. The mistake most organizations make is purposefully making the hiring process easier out of fear of losing the candidate.

Thomas Payne said, “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value.” Being with the best requires paying the price. Candidates learn respect for the position and respect for the company by seeing how seriously the company takes the hiring process. The best candidates don’t want to be with some company that just rolls over. Remember: Everybody wants to belong to The Club that is impossible to get in.

87 percent of people who voluntarily (i.e., quit) leave a company do so because of a lack of growth and development opportunity. It’s human nature to want to improve, develop new skills, succeed, and advance. If you have good people, make them better. Use simulations to continually train and develop your team. And you know what they call the company with the top employees…they call that company the best!

Andy Grove, the Intel visionary, said, “The most important charge a good manager owns is the responsibility to continuously train his/her employees.” When you add in the training component, you have three areas where you can either irreparably damage or exponentially advance your most precious resource.

To ensure you are hiring A-Players – and for training to be both impactful and “sticky” – you have to closely tie how things are actually done in your organization to any evaluation and development of personnel. This is why simulations are such a critical management tool.

03/16/2016

Today's blog post is by Bob Sanders. He currently serves as President and CEO of AXIOM Sales Force Development. He has more than twenty five-years experience in sales, sales management, and marketing. He is dedicated to elevating the sales profession and delivering exceptional results for sales people, their customers and their companies.

If you want a sustainable competitive advantage, it may be time to radically rethink the traditional approach to sales training. We are finding an increasing number of companies living on the front lines of a sales learning revolution and achieving lower turnover, faster ramp times, higher participation rates, and better overall performance. These spectacular results are being achieved by making learning a continuous part of the sales cadence and integrating learning, coaching, and selling tools into their CRM.

We all know the challenges with traditional sales training programs. Most can provide a small, short-lived spike in sales performance, but the overall impact and ROI of the investment is often suspect. However, the transformation of CRM systems, especially Salesforce.com – from contact, account, and opportunity management solutions to full sales effectiveness platforms – presents an opportunity for a radically new paradigm: the learning sales organization.

From our perspective, the learning sales organization differs from a traditional sales organization in the following ways:

Classroom training is replaced largely by online learning that is available anywhere – any time salespeople want or need to learn.

Sales managers play a significantly greater role in the development of their sellers. They leverage technology to help them better diagnose improvement opportunities and leverage the online learning to improve the skill and knowledge of their teams.

Applications for opportunity management, account planning and management, and sales coaching are often embedded in Salesforce.com and drive learning application, methodology execution, and Salesforce.com adoption.

Senior leaders set objectives for learning and coaching and integrate these performance metrics into their score cards.

A recent special report by Aberdeen helps highlight the impact this shift is having for best-in-class sales organizations.

Beyond improving sales performance, the continuously learning approach can help your company dramatically reduce their training expenses. One company we know well recently merged with another organization of nearly the same size – onboarding nearly 500 sellers and managers to their existing sales and coaching methodology without conducting any traditional training events! This saved the company an estimated $1,000,000 in travel and training expenses and dramatically reduced integration time.

Beyond the traditional metrics and improved CRM adoption, becoming a learning sales organization can transform your customer relationships. When learning is a matter of course rather than a sporadic event, sellers and managers develop the habit of continuous learning. This habit will allow them to absorb and apply new information about your solutions and competitive intelligence more quickly and completely – making the entire organization more flexible and improving the sales ramp-up for new products. More importantly, however, by building their learning muscles, salespeople are able to engage with customers in a dramatically more effective way. Salespeople who have “learned to learn” build more authentic relationships with their customers, investing in understanding customers rather than constantly pitching the next product. Customers are better served, salespeople deliver better results, and relationships are stronger and more sustainable.

So where should you begin your journey to becoming a learning sales organization? As Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Here are a couple of suggestions on how you can begin the transformation in small but meaningful ways:

Establish a common methodology for key selling activities, including opportunity management, account planning and management, and sales coaching. This should include an ideal model for engaging customers supported by well-defined skills.

Insist upon a plan for any training initiative that includes follow-up activities that will help cement the learning. See this blog post for more information on the learning cycle that necessitates the need for small, bite-sized learning activities followed by practice and application.

Implement a coaching solution. Sales leaders will have greater impact on the development of their teams than anything done by the training and development team. Make sure your managers become great coaches by:

Defining corrective action in the form of learning, practice, and application activities that will shrink gaps

Measuring and evaluating coaching effectiveness across the organization

Integrate measures for sales coaching and learning into your senior leadership scorecard. Even if you are not fully equipped as a learning sales organization, adding measures for this will help ensure you continue to make incremental progress along your journey.

Celebrate learning and coaching. Once you start measuring this, be certain to celebrate it. Too often, leaders give far greater attention to what is wrong than what is right. As Frank Blake, former Home Depot CEO, has said, what you celebrate tells the organization what is important.

Should you need help with your initiative, or if you’re just looking to share ideas, don’t hesitate to reach out to us here at AXIOM. We’d be happy to assist you in any way we can.

10/06/2015

In our digital world, traditional sales training and enablement techniques are broken. Salespeople simply can’t maximize their learning and retention of information when they’re brought into a conference room and pumped full of content they won’t use right away.

Research has shown that more than 60 percent of people are visual learners. In fact, we tend to process visuals 600,000 times faster than text. For younger business audiences, video is king. According to a Forbes Insight report, 30 percent of executives under the age of 40 indicated that they prefer video for reviewing business information.

Historically, the technology to leverage video content has created bottlenecks for sales organizations. But, after two years of hard work honing the technology in the platform, Allego has formally announced the global launch of its mobile, just-in-time (JIT) sales learning platform, which successfully harnesses the power of video.

Allego’s solution securely manages large volumes of compressed video. This gives companies the ability to transform the way they create, collect, curate, and distribute content from the field. This enables managers and sales reps to maximize their collaboration through role-play and video-based practice, promoting continuous learning and improving sales performance.

We’re seeing that most organizations’ work forces are continually on the road. Allego was built mobile-first, so it can be easily accessed anywhere, anytime – with or without a network connection. With the power of video to communicate large amounts of information, Allego simplifies JIT learning and real-time collaboration so the best ideas from the field are captured and shared quickly throughout the broader sales team.

The platform also incorporates coaching and feedback, so sales managers can focus their attention on specific deals to ensure sales reps are prepared ahead of their meetings. Allego defines JIT learning as the combination of:

just-in-time content

practice

assignments

field knowledge

collaboration

traditional certification and live training.

There’s currently no other platform available that offers this combination of these components.

Mary Charles, sales enablement director at Demandware, has said that the Allego platform has “completely transformed” their global approach to sales training and enablement. Demandware has found the platform to be a critical asset in onboarding new hires and helping them ramp up faster – executing sales certification and enabling representatives in the field to quickly and easily share best practices, success stories, and winning strategies wherever they’re doing business. They’ve seen more effective collaboration across the team and more consistent messaging.

The Demandware experience validates the need for an easy-to-use, video-optimized solution that enables sharing, collaboration, practice, and feedback among distributed sales teams.

09/23/2015

Today's post is by Jason Jordan, a founding partner of Vantage Point Performance, a global sales management training and development firm, and co-author of Cracking the Sales Management Code. Jordan is a recognized thought leader in the domain of B2B sales and teaches sales and sales management at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business.

Sales trainers have long been challenged to demonstrate a return on investment for their efforts. Return on Investment (ROI) is a fairly straightforward calculation derived from two key numbers – the upfront investment and the eventual return. Divide the return by the investment, and, hopefully, a big number appears.

It’s fair to say that demonstrating ROI has been an ongoing challenge for sales management training and development teams, because the “return” portion is so difficult to measure. It’s easy to determine the “I” because the investment (or, as some like to think of it, the expense) is a known dollar amount that is budgeted and spent. Not accounting for other soft costs like internal company time and resources, this number is easily quantified and very apparent. No problems with the “I”. The “R” in “returns,” however....

What’s the Real Return on Sales Training?

Correlating specific returns with a particular sales management training investment is a bit of a challenge. First, there is the fact that the “R” can take a while to appear. Sales teams tend to want instant gratification; but that’s not how training works. It takes time for behaviors and skills to change – and even longer for them to demonstrably affect sales performance. Lengthy sales cycles may push the incremental returns well into the future, when the training is a distant memory and the budget long since spent.

A second challenge is even more difficult, though – the desire to measure the “R” in increased sales revenue. The investment is clearly a financial measure, so why shouldn’t the return be, too? It certainly could be…but, in our experience, it’s a hard case to make.

It’s a hard case to make because many elements affect revenue growth. For example: your products, your customers, the economy, the competition. Not to mention the fact that everyone – from product managers to the CEO – will try to take credit that their initiatives and activities increased sales.

How can we know for sure that increased revenue was the direct outcome of a specific sales management training program? That’s a tough fight. And you could be fighting over credit for revenue for a long, long time.

So we believe the best strategy is not to fight over credit for increased revenue. In fact, we think revenue is the wrong “R” to use for determining the impact of sales management training. There are other ways to measure the impact of sales training that are more direct and apparent.

Three Metrics that Show ROI on Sales Training

If you’ve read our book Cracking the Sales Management Code, viewed our webinars, or generally engaged with Vantage Point in any fashion, you’ve probably been exposed to our ROA metrics framework revealed in our 2008-2010 research effort. Stated simply, we found that there are three levels of metrics that sales forces measure:

Business Results, like revenue, market share, and other things that are the outcome of many different influences

Sales Objectives, like new customer acquisitions, deal win rates, customer retention, and other goals the sales force is asked to accomplish

One key insight from the research was that there are causal relationships between these different metrics. For instance, if I make more prospecting calls (an Activity), I should win more new customers (an Objective), and that should lead to more revenue (a Result). Or, if I do better account planning (an Activity), then I should retain more of my customers (an Objective), and I should maintain or grow my revenue (a Result).

So here’s where we think there is an opportunity for sales trainers to make a better case for the impact they are having on sales performance. In our opinion, trying to measure the impact of training (an Activity) on revenue (a Result) is too much of a leap. More specifically, it’s a leap right over the Sales Objectives that are more directly influenced by the changed salesperson behaviors that training creates.

Tracking a Sales Objective: Increased Close Rates

Let me give you an example. One of our major clients hired us to work with their sales managers to improve a very specific performance indicator. Was it to increase their revenue? Nope. It was to increase their close rates. They wanted to win more deals (a Sales Objective). Could we train their sales managers in such a way that close rates on new opportunities increased? Of course we could…and we did. Did that lead to increased revenue? Sure. But we didn’t have to fight over credit for that. We had increased the close rates – mission accomplished.

So aiming sales management training at a Sales Objective rather than a Business Result was a pretty smart strategy. It gave the sales trainers (in this case, us) something reasonable to accomplish: change certain behaviors that will directly affect a Sales Objective. We can design training to help reps cross-sell products. Or win new customers. Or grow existing accounts. The activities and behaviors that align with those Objectives are fairly apparent – much more apparent than “increase revenue.”

Now you understand why we propose that the return on sales management training not be measured in terms of revenue. We think the “R” should be measured in Sales Objectives that can be directly influenced by altered selling behaviors. Focusing on Sales Objectives provides a more direct target for the sales force and its trainers. And having a target you can assuredly hit is a very comforting thing.

08/27/2015

Today's guest post is by Nick Rini, CEO of Selleration. Selleration combines 3D avatar role plays with predictive analytics to provide sales managers with actionable insight into the performance and productivity of their teams.

Sales leaders are constantly leading our sales organizations through various transitions to address customer needs, navigate market conditions, overcome pricing pressures, and outdo the competition. Almost every one of those transitions requires a change in behavior to break habits and establish new ones that support your mission.

Whether we’re trying to improve customer satisfaction scores or get our salespeople to sell higher in the customer org chart, behavior change is the key factor to success.

So, how do sales leaders typically go about changing behavior? We usually start with sales training. We offer a stick, a contest, or a financial incentive. Too often, though, we employ the worst tactic of all – the dreaded mandate – to encourage change. We ignore the need for reinforcement. Then, we get disappointing results. We find that the training didn’t stick beyond the time it takes to walk from the training room to a salesperson’s BMW.

Why does this happen? Because we’ve missed the point! We give our troops training, incentives, and warnings to change their behavior, but we don’t change their thinking about the mission. We don’t compel them to adopt the mission and own the results.

So how do you really achieve behavior change?

The answer is simple. Mindset Transformation (MT). Mindset Transformation is the process of changing the way people think about and view the mission. It’s the epiphany (or the “aha” moment) that causes us to make drastic behavior changes – like quitting smoking/drinking or committing to a weight-loss regimen. Because the urge to change comes from within rather than an external source (for example, incentives, rewards, punishments, etc.) we’re more empowered when we align our behaviors with the results we want.

How does sales training complement MT? Sales training is informational and great for addressing the questions that begin with “How do I..?” By contrast, MT is about answering questions that start with “Why should I…?”

There are many ways to facilitate MT. Elements of MT include visualization, learning by doing, and understanding: 1) how we fit in the big picture, 2) how important a role each of us plays in accomplishing the mission, and 3) what’s in it for us. Sometimes it’s a matter of helping people understand how easy something is to accomplish. I’ve accomplished MT with games and simulations by putting salespeople in real-world selling situations where they understand the power and importance they have. We put reinforcement components in place as well to keep them on track. An approach to performing MT is as follows.

1. Communicating mission – Call a team meeting to inform them about the mission. Invite them to ask questions and share their thoughts about how to accomplish the mission.

2. Understanding mindset baseline – Ask your team members to share their perceptions of the mission, company and management. This helps identify how those perceptions might manifest as challenges and obstacles that could affect the mission. Know that your team may communicate a wide variety of frustrations and fears – some may not be related to the mission. It’s important to hear them out on each and every point. As you guide them through this process, weed out elements that are irrelevant to the mission. (You can always commit to addressing frustrations that do not relate to the mission at a separate time.)

3. Engaging – Have your team develop the plan that will accomplish the mission. They have to be the ones to lay out the goals, the end results, and the steps required to achieve the desired results. This is where they begin to take ownership of the mission and results. They will likely tell you why it’s impossible or difficult. You need to understand why they believe this can’t be done. It will likely boil down to some things you have to address – like access to information or a resource to make prequalifying calls. At this point, you need to commit to, and possibly explain, how you will address their concerns that would otherwise hinder their ability to accomplish the mission. Your commitment to participate in the removal of obstacles – whether it’s red tape or some other issue – is either a deal breaker or a deal maker. If you’re not able to do this for them, they’re not likely to commit.

4. Obtaining “Buy-in” – Ask the team for their commitment. “Can we get this done?” “Are you confident we can meet the goals we have here?” You may need to reiterate your commitment to removing the obstacles they have identified. You should challenge them as well. Ask them, “What will keep this from happening as we’ve laid it out in this plan?” You’ll know immediately whether they’re committed and feel they own the mission. If not, you’ve missed something important. Go back to step 2 and repeat that process, follow with step 3, and then move on to step 4 until you have garnered the commitment of the team.

5. Reinforcing and tracking – Ask the team to develop a plan for how you will track progress and reinforce the behavior desired. This is essential to succeeding. Maybe create a spreadsheet that contains milestones and dates you can use as checkpoints.

Empowering your team to do their jobs by removing red tape; giving them the tools, authority, autonomy, incentives, and support they need to accomplish the mission; and clearing the way for success will foster MT.

By the way, your top performers naturally have a different mindset than the rest of the pack. That’s the primary reason they tend to succeed – usually independently. You might take some time to understand what makes them tick, but it will be enlightening and could help you identify skills and behaviors that help transform the mindset of other reps!

08/26/2015

Today’s post is by Jason Jordan, founding partner of Vantage Point Performance, a global sales management training and development firm, and co-author of Cracking the Sales Management Code. Jordan is a recognized thought leader in the domain of B2B sales and teaches sales and sales management at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business.

For more than a century, sales training has focused predominantly on improving the skills of frontline sellers. And this makes intuitive sense – if you want to sell more stuff, then train the people who sell it. The logic is practically unassailable.

Assailing that logic is Neil Rackham, a well-regarded thought leader and author of Spin Selling. At a recent Sales Management Association’s Sales Productivity Conference, Rackham advised the audience to spend ten dollars on training frontline sales managers for every one dollar spent on training sales forces. Rackham opined that he would rather have mediocre salespeople than mediocre frontline sales managers – since the latter are pivotal for responding in a rapidly changing world. (Watch a short excerpt of Rackham’s advice.)

Our experience just happens to jibe with Rackham’s advice. We have helped clients achieve greater and more consistent sales improvement by training frontline sales managers – not the frontline sellers. Sales management training rather than sales rep training. In fact, we’ve seen win rates, margins, and revenues increase in all of our recent clients’ sales forces, though we never trained a single salesperson. Let me repeat that: we’ve never trained a single salesperson. All of this was accomplished by improving the knowledge, skills, tools, and behaviors of the salespeople’s managers.

You see, no one has greater influence on a salesperson’s skills and behaviors than their direct managers. While the knowledge gained during a one- or two-day off-site training event has to sit in the salesperson’s brain until it’s needed, well-trained sales managers train their sellers every day in the field. As a result, the instruction and coaching are constant and relevant – so, if sales managers are equipped to do the right things, their salespeople’s performance will improve every day. Sales management training ensures that sales rep training is ongoing – not a one-off event.

Second, sales managers are in contact with their sellers when real deals are being won or lost, and they can educate sellers in real time about how to improve. If you had a choice between 1) teaching someone to conduct a good sales call in a classroom or 2) teaching someone to conduct a good sales call before, during, and after an actual sales call, which would you prefer? Sales management training can actually accelerate sales improvement.

So, when you consider the best venue for sales training, it’s clearly not in the classroom – it’s in the field. And the best way to take the sales training to the field is to make your sales managers the trainers. When sales managers know how to teach and coach their sellers, sales performance improves. And it improves immediately, because managers influence real deals in real time. They use “real life” case studies to influence behaviors that lead to real revenue.

Conveniently, sales management training is also a high-leverage investment. When you train one salesperson, you’ve improved one salesperson. When you train one sales manager, you’ve improved that manager’s entire team. Spend as much as you can on sales management training, because the impact on sales performance is substantial and immediate. If there’s any budget left over, then think about training the sellers.

08/19/2015

Realizing and sustaining the benefits of sales training depend largely upon the perspective at the client organization. Many sales leaders see skills improvement as one big, momentous event – almost akin to a mass baptismal. They think that, if they take the whole sales team down to the local sales training event, they’ll all be reinvented (“saved,” if you will) from bad habits and talent deficiencies, and they’ll instantly emerge as a vastly improved organization prepared to slay the competition and gain the competitive advantage.

If only it was that easy!

In reality, changing selling skills for the better is a process, not an event. It takes a sustained effort – as well as commitment and engagement – from both the organization’s leadership and from every member of the sales team. I say this as a sales training leader who has worked with hundreds of business organizations to help sales teams learn, develop, and implement new selling skills.

I know sales professionals are often frustrated after their organization’s sales training event, and feel as though they have been dipped in the new sales philosophy and left on their own to make something of it. But there are things everyone can do to facilitate success. Here are five tips I recommend:

Sales leaders and professionals must all create an environment of accountability, with leaders setting clear agreement on implementation and salespeople being made accountable to frontline managers and each other with improvements, coaching examples, and metrics.

To master new selling skills, salespeople need one thing: practice! Mastery will never occur without practice – regardless of the ease or difficulty of the subject. In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell contends that it takes roughly 10,000 hours to become skilled enough to be considered an expert in any area. Salespeople should take every opportunity to use their new skills right away.

Everyone must “lead” the transformation. With the ratio of sales professionals to managers skyrocketing, peer development has become increasingly important. Sales professionals should not only use their new selling skills daily, but also model that behavior and coach colleagues at every opportunity. This helps the entire sales team visualize effective sales behaviors and the exceptional customer experience they are capable of providing.

Use selling skills as part of the sales process. New selling skills are knowledge; sales process is habit. Think of it this way: someone with heart disease learns about healthy eating. That’s knowledge. However, if the person doesn’t follow up with proper habits (eating the right foods, exercising, etc.), he or she won’t see results. Selling skills will have little to no impact if they’re not incorporated into your sales process and then used habitually. (That includes everyone in the sales organization, including field sales, inside sales, sales operations, and managers.)

Sales leaders should build recognition and rewards into the new sales training initiative. Ask key senior sales professionals to look for opportunities to publicly recognize salespeople for using their new skills – and highlight their successful results. In addition, peer recognition can be a powerful motivator. Sales managers should encourage salespeople to share their successes; this can be easily done in regular sales meetings or conference calls, or in an email to the entire sales team. These acts will spread awareness of how the program is gaining traction and having positive effects throughout the organization.

Breaking old habits may be the most difficult part of a sales-training transformation. It takes patience, practice, reinforcement, and recognition to reprogram our thinking and change our behavior.

Learning new selling skills represents a courageous, personal transformation, and everyone can take pride in that self improvement. Remember, the ultimate payoff will show up in higher commissions, improved customer satisfaction, and a competitive advantage for the company.

06/09/2015

Do your sales training efforts change the behavior of your sales reps and make your business more money? In many cases, sales training amounts to a booklet of old-fashioned ideas that have little to no impact on your business culture.

However, proper sales training is essential – not only as a way to ensure you’re getting the best out of your team, but also to make sure processes are uniform across the company. And training isn’t just about new recruits. Every member of your team needs training from time to time.

Here are five tactics for effectively training your sales team – from beginners to experienced sellers.

1.Role play is still effective!

Most people learn best if they’re actually doing something, as opposed to just listening. Role play can give your team practical, hands-on training that forces them to think on their feet. Here are some good situations to role play:

how your team works in CRM

how they overcome objections

elevator pitches

cold calls

negotiation tactics

This is also a great opportunity to look for common selling mistakes, such as talking too much, over-educating, or failing to ask questions.

To make the most of role plays, record them. For example, ContactWorld for Sales allows you to record calls for training and legal compliance; this means you can analyze real calls with your team to see how they’re performing and whether they’re putting their training into action. Sometimes it’s only by evaluating what you do on a day-to-day basis that you can truly learn and improve.

2.Set up a peer mentor system

Peer mentoring is obviously essential during ramp-up for new hires, as there’s so much about the company itself to learn before you can begin selling effectively. But having input from a senior sales professional can also be useful later on in a sales person’s career.

3.Ensure your training covers why people buy

Too often, sales training covers the ‘logical side’ of sales – in other words, the features, functions and business benefits of the product or service and how to best communicate these to the prospect. While this is still important, sales training should also cover the emotional, political and subconscious forces that have an impact on the decision.

4. Build confidence with easy sells

Confidence is an essential skill for any salesperson. But, if you’re new in a job or you’re struggling to start out, your confidence – and, consequently, your ability to sell effectively – can take a knock.

For the first few months, focus new hires on products or prospects that you know to be an easy sell. Let your new sales team make sale after sale, and watch their confidence grow. When they come to tackle the riskier prospects later on, they’ll be filled with self-confidence, which will swing the sale their way.

5. Ensure training is consistent

Training needs to be consistent. This is because the only way you can get every member of your team to use a CRM the same way is if they all get the same information at the start. Experienced sales reps may be great at what they do, but, if the way they log progress on the CRM is different to everyone else (or lacking detail), they’ll be harder to manage and some information could get lost.

Without the right information, you’ll be missing valuable insights and will be unable to forecast accurately, which could have a direct impact on the business’ goals.

How do you train your sales team? Do you have any tips you’d like to share?

Many salespeople make three mistakes when dealing with decision makers:

They assume that the person who has inquired about their solution through social media or the person they’ve called is the decision maker without confirming this beforehand.

They deliver an need-solving message that is not targeted toward the customer or prospect but is based upon the benefits and corresponding measurable results produced by the rep’s other customers.

Once sales reps have reached decision makers, according to one study, almost 85 percent of inside sales reps fail to ask for a time- and date-specific action step at the end of every call.

How can you fix mistakes like these? First, call the prospect’s company and ask someone in upper management who is responsible for making decisions about acquiring your types of solutions. Then see if the recommended person is the same person who inquired or you plan to call.

Next, take the time to go through you customer successes and see if you can quantify the results they realized in terms of money, time, and/or resources. Once you have defined the decision maker’s typical personal and professional characteristics, then you can determine what types of short customer stories will resonate with this person BEFORE you speak with him or her.

Knowing your industry and the customer’s marketplace and competition should help you further narrow down your message to one or two succinct sentences. Consider an opening benefits/results value statement like this:

“[Decision maker’s first name], we work with other [title, such as CIOs] like you in companies such as [three of the prospect company’s competitors, well-known customers of yours, or your customers who are located near the prospect company that the decision maker would probably recognize] to help them [a specific faster/slower, easier/harder, less expensive, or better benefit]. This means they’ve been able to [either an increased or decreased measurable numeric result in terms of money, percentages, time, or resources].”

For example:

“Tom, we work with CSOs like you in companies such as Your Competitor 1, Your Competitor 2, and Your Competitor 3 to help them speed up the qualified sales that make it through their pipelines. This means they’ve been able to increase their sales by 55 percent or more within the last six months while decreasing the costs of acquiring those sales by more than 22 percent.”

Finally, the sales rep needs to get in the habit of asking for a time- and date-specific action step – but not just once. Studies show that the likelihood of getting a decision maker to agree to action goes way up when a sales rep makes at least three requests for action. You might say something like this at the end of the conversation: “If we could help you do something similar, would that be of value to you?” The key to getting the next step is asking questions until you find out what the decision maker values or finds important as related to your solutions.

Using a well-constructed opening benefits/results value statement directly related to what the decision maker needs will get you a yes or a maybe. After the decision maker responds, immediately follow up with a recommendation such as, “What I’d like to do is to set up a brief [phone or face-to-face] meeting to introduce myself [or associate] and understand more about how your company does business. Then I can determine if we can be of service to you [or produce similar results for the decision maker’s company]. Do you have your calendar handy?”

Or you might ask, “When would be a good day and time for us to get together to discuss possible next steps? Is this typically a good time to reach you?”

Then ask, “Do you have your calendar handy?” or “What is your email address so I can email you a meeting invite with the purpose of the meeting and my contact information?”

Remember these tips and you will become more effective and efficient at producing measurable sales results and boosting your bottom line.

How do you influence decision makers? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

09/08/2014

Could a salesperson sell more by applying a mindful approach to selling? Meditation and mindfulness expert John Kabat-Zinn has done much to bring mindfulness practice into the mainstream. He defines mindfulness as "paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally, to the unfolding of experience moment to moment."

Can mindfulness practice be used to improve sales performance? What does it mean for a salesperson to purposely pay attention in the present moment?

The “present moment” for salespeople is when they’re selling. It's when they’re interacting with customers. The past is their preparation. The future is the outcome.

“Purposely paying attention” means the salesperson chooses to put aside how he or she had prepared for things to go. It also means the salesperson chooses to put aside expectations for a particular outcome. In exchange for setting aside the past and the future, the salesperson pays attention to his or her experience in the present, the customer interaction, as it's unfolding moment to moment. The attention will be nonjudgmental, meaning the salesperson won't deem the interaction to be going well or not going well.

Practicing mindfulness while selling flies in the face of some traditional sales-training assumptions. Traditional sales training puts an emphasis on presentation preparation. It also encourages salespeople to maintain control of customer interactions so that salespeople can create the desired outcome. Could salespeople be more productive putting their preparation and outcome aspirations aside while in the midst of a customer interaction? My answer is a resounding yes.

Mindfulness improves sales performance because the salesperson's attention is on his or her customer interaction as it unfolds moment by moment. This results in interactions with more depth and breadth. Customer interactions are where the rubber meets the road in terms of sales performance. Clinging to presentation preparation and expected outcomes can be as limiting for salespeople as they are helpful.

Mindfulness deepens customer interaction by inspiring buying decisions that the customer helped create. It sounds paradoxical, but it's better for buying decisions to be different from how the salesperson planned. It means the customer's buying fulfilled his or her own reason, rather than a salesperson's predetermined reason. Salespeople can't always be around to remind customers to use, recommend, and reorder their product. Salespeople must rely upon some degree of customer initiative. If a customer feels part of the buying decision, then it’s more likely that customers will follow through after the salesperson leaves.

Practicing mindfulness gives customer interactions more breadth by helping salespeople be more versatile. In the real world, few customer interactions go as planned. A salesperson who is nonjudgmentally paying attention in the moment is best able to respond appropriately. A mindful salesperson's response is unencumbered by dependence on predetermined plans or a narrow limit of acceptable outcomes.